Tag Archives: Digital Commonwealth

Samuel Chamberlain’s Salem

The Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, steward of so much of Salem’s printed, written and visual history amongst its many collections, has recently digitized over 5000 images from the “Samuel V. Chamberlain Collection of Photographic Negatives, 1928-1971″ and they are available and searchable at the Digital Commonwealth. Combined with the Frank Cousins images which the Phillips made available several years ago, there is now a very strong visual record of Salem’s architecture and streetscapes in the first half of the twentieth century, or at least some of Salem’s buildings and streets as neither Cousins or Chamberlain were particularly interested in “working Salem”. Cousins was a bit more of a documentarian than Chamberlain, especially as his era (roughly 1890-1920) encompassed the Great Salem Fire of 1914. Chamberlain was a man of the world, a gourmand, and an artist: his Salem photographs encompass only one part of his work, but an important part as he lived in nearby Marblehead for many years so developed quite an intimate knowledge of the city. I’ve always been struck by his perspectives, but I thought that I’d seen most of his Salem shots as he published so many books of photography of New England scenes in general and of Salem structures in particular, including Historic Salem in Four Seasons (1938), Salem Interiors (1950), and A Stroll through Historic Salem (1969). But I was wrong: there are discoveries to be made among the 1600+ Salem images included in the Phillips Library’s Chamberlain negative collection at Digital Commonwealth. The vast majority of these photographs are of the McIntire Historic District in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, but I can see different details and angles in Chamberlain’s images of these perennially-showcased streets and structures—and lots of wonderful TREES.

New perspectives of old streets: and the interior of the depot!

These are images which struck me as “new” for one reason or another, although the first photograph is just the view of Chestnut Street from my window, over a half-century ago, and everything looks pretty much the same! Look at all the amazing elms: on the other end of Chestnut, on Essex, at the intersection of Federal and Washington Streets. A great photograph of the Lindall-Barnard-Andrews house (c. 1740; 3rd from top) and its amazing fence before some serious mistreatment in the later 20th century. Interesting views of Lynn Street, the Salem Maritime National Historic Site with trees, St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church and the Post Office and Washington Street before it became Riley Plaza (What is the white house on Norman?) One of my favorite little buildings on upper Essex Street was a bookstore! The Thomas Sanders house on Summer Street (2nd from bottom) looks much the same, but I want Mr. Chamberlain to turn around: what is behind him? And finally, a rare shot of the interior of the Boston & Maine train depot—rare in general but also for Chamberlain who preferred more timeless and aesthetic perspectives.

Change: Chamberlain was more interested in timelessness and continuity than change, but he couldn’t help but document some changes in Salem over the span of his work, from the 1930s through the 1960s. He was far more interested in urban survival than urban renewal, however: this was a man that sketched French chateaux amidst the destruction of World War I.

Two views of the London Coffeehouse or Red’s Sandwich Shop on Central Street; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s birthplace in its original location and from Hardy Street; The Curwen House rounds the corner from Essex to North Streets; 8 Chestnut Street very hemmed in by the second Second Church; which burned down in 1950, The Richard Derby House also very hemmed in; Charter Street before urban renewal; the cupola from the Pickman-Derby-Rogers House on Washington Street on the grounds of Essex Institute, now gone; the entrance to what Chamberlain called “the Italian Church,” St. Mary’s, built in 1925 and closed by the Archdiocese of Boston in 2003.

A few interiors: Chamberlain’s interior images are lavish and full of architectural and decorative detail; I’ve only included a few shots here but what a resource! All the PEM houses are here, and many Chestnut Street interiors, as well as views of interiors of both public and private homes which are seldom seen. His Salem Interiors has been a favorite book of mine since I was a teenage, and this Phillips/Digital Commonwealth collection includes many shots which are not included in that publication so I’ll going back quite a bit.

Pictorial paper in the Sanders house on Summer Street (see exterior above); much to see in the Northey house parlors, but ships on mouldings—how Salem can you get? Amazing fireplace in the East India House on Essex Street.

Chestnut Street Days! Who knew Chamberlain was such a great photographer of people? Certainly not me. Probably the most charming Salem photos in the Phillips Chamberlain collection are his portraits of Salem residents in colonial dress for the Chestnut Street Days which were held on at least 5 occasions from 1926 to 1976. I think that the photos below are from the 1947 and 1952 Chestnut Street Days, but I’m not entirely sure about the former date. These are wonderful photos of happy people, men, women and lots of children, smiling at the man behind the camera, Samuel Chamberlain. Just delightful. I’m going to post more on these in the future, but I’ve really got to do some oral histories first.

Chestnut Street Day, c. 1947-52. Not a great photograph to close out this wonderful collection, but is this the great man himself? Plus, the dog.


Salem’s Scholar-Activist

The second president of the university where I teach was Alpheus Crosby (1810-1874), although his title was Principal of what was then known as Salem Normal School, a pioneering institution in both the education of teachers and women. While “scholar-activism” is an integral part of professional life for many in higher education today, it was a somewhat different pursuit in the nineteenth century, and Crosby’s life exemplifies that of a scholar-activist in that time, while also representing the differences between his time and ours. Crosby was an eminent scholar of classical Greek who became a passionate advocate of public education: for women and freed slaves in particular, for everyone in principle. He managed to pursue these two callings simultaneously even though they did not always intersect—-to connect them, he also became an expert on educational instruction, publishing papers and delivering lecturing on “emulation” and grammatical “analysis” (which seems to refer to dissecting sentences—a practice I wish was still current) and serving as editor of The Massachusetts Teacher. These professional activities were just part of his life, which also included a decades-long devotion to the abolitionist and suffrage movements and major roles in Salem’s key cultural institutions: the Salem Lyceum, the Salem Athenaeum, and the Essex Institute. He was a very “public man” by vocation and predilection.

Crosby pic

Crosby Normal School 1865 SSU

pixlr

Crosby Ad The Massachusetts Teacher 13Alpheus Crosby and several (not all!) of his equally successful siblings, the sons of Dr. Asa Crosby of Sandwich, New Hampshire. The Normal School at Salem on Broad and Summer Streets during Crosby’s tenure, c. 1857-1865, Salem State University Archives; just a few of the Salem institutions to which Alpheus Crosby volunteered considerable time: the Salem Lyceum, the Salem Athenaeum (then at Plummer Hall) and the Essex Institute, Cousins collection of the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum via Digital Commonwealth; Professor Crosby’s bestselling series of Greek textbooks, 1860.

Because Crosby was so active, he was memorialized everywhere upon his death in 1874. I read a lot of obituaries and none were pro forma: all were very personal and absolutely reverent. Some personal details: his first wife, Abigail Cutler of Newburyport, was an invalid whom he took on a tour of Europe after their marriage, during which she died in 1837. He returned to his professorship at Dartmouth, where he had commenced teaching at age 23, but resigned and moved to Newburyport to care for his mother-in-law, who was also an invalid, upon the death of her husband. During this period—over a decade—he continued his Greek scholarship but also served as Newburyport’s Superintendent of Schools. Upon Mrs. Cutler’s death, he went south to Salem and began his post at the Normal School. in 1857. There followed an expanded curriculum, a larger library, and enthusiastic (by all accounts) teaching by the Principal, who was clearly much more than an administrator: many student testimonies speak to his “remarkable spirit of earnestness” and enthusiasm, and then there is this glowing account in the Salem Observer, from December of 1861.

Crosby CollageCrosby Oberserver 3

In that same year, Crosby married Martha Kingman of Bridgewater, who was an instructor at the Normal School. As the Civil War progressed, he became increasingly focused on the emerging agenda of political, social and educational reform in the south, publishing several works on the topic, becoming the first chairman of the Salem Freedmen’s Aid Society, and taking on editorial duties for The Right Way, a new journal dedicated to advocating for progressive reconstruction. The urgency of this work prompted his resignation from the Normal School in 1866, citing “the critical condition of the country at the present time and the danger that the rights of colored people will not be duly regarded in the coming reconstruction.” That work—-and his classical scholarship—consumed him until his death in 1874. Several of the obituaries marking his death, including those in the New York Times and Boston Globe, make note of the two “colored girls” which Professor and Mrs. Crosby adopted, “an act which provoked much comment.” I have to admit I couldn’t find any comment and not much about these two girls, whom I suspect were fostered rather than adopted by the Crosbys. They are referred to (and provided for) in Crosby’s 1874 will as “Amy Lydia Dennis and Lucy B. Dennis, living with me.” I’d really like to know more about these two women.

Crosby Suffrage Collage

Crosby donation

Crosby Donation 3

20191117_151200 Post-“retirement”: advocacy for radical reconstruction and “impartial” suffrage, 1865-66, Library of Congress; just one donation to the Normal School at Salem. 111 Federal Street in Salem, the residence of Professor and Mrs. Crosby, along with Amy Lydia and Lucy B. Dennis, during the 1860s.

Obviously there is a lot more to learn about Professsor Alpheus Crosby: his life, his work, his world. He is book-worthy! I was inspired to post about him now because of a rather odd confluence of factors. I was reading up on Xenophon for the book I’m working on, as he was a very popular author of husbandry and household tracts in the Tudor era despite being dead for centuries, and I encountered Professor Crosby’s name everywhere I clicked. And the materialist side of me is a constant real- “estalker” and his Federal Street house has recently been on the market. Once I had Alpheus Crosby on my mind, he was suddenly everywhere: just last Friday I was walking back to my office after finishing my last class and I saw one of my students in the hall, waiting to begin her classical Greek tutorial with our Department’s ancient historian, Erik Jensen, and I thought: Professor Crosby would be so pleased!


There is Light

A large part of the frustration many in Salem felt at the removal of Salem’s archival heritage contained in the collections of the Peabody Essex Museum’s Phillips Library in 2017 was due to the fact that so little of these materials had been digitized: a tiny fraction, with no guarantees of more to come. I do think it was surprising to many just how far behind comparable institutions the PEM was in the process of increasing access to its collections, and this vulnerability certainly made it easy for nattering nabobs like me to criticize their complete, non-compensated removal. But a few months ago we began to hear of some major digitization initiatives, and yesterday was a truly joyous day, as the PEM uploaded its newly-digitized collection of glass plate negatives by the Salem photographer Frank Cousins (1851-1925) to the Digital Commonwealth site, enabling access to thousands of historic images of streets, houses, objects and people in Salem and other towns and cities from c. 1890-1920, just like that. I’ve been waiting for these images for a decade, browsing the printed catalog of negatives regularly, knowing exactly what was there, and what I could not see, what we all could not see. And then suddenly we could.

Cousins TeamThe Frank Cousins “Team”/ Employees’ carriage in the Columbus Day parade in Salem, 1892, Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum: Frank Cousins Collection of Glass Plate Negatives via Digital Commonwealth.

It was a little overwhelming going through these images, which include several cities (lots of Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and quite a few New England towns—Cousins was a publisher of both books and photographs with his own art company as well as his retail store, the Bee-Hive, on Essex Street, and he was also an early preservation consultant), but of course I was only interested in the Salem images. Oddly, I became a bit……anxious, even tearful, going through them, both because it was so amazing to see structures and streets I had only imagined, and then I realized what we had lost: both to the Great Salem Fire of 1914 (on this very day!) and later “redevelopment”. My friend, former student, and fellow blogger Jen Ratliff, a fierce archivist who is just as invested in all of this as I am, was a bit overwhelmed as well, so we decided to conduct a little cross-blogging experiment so that we could focus: we each chose our top ten Cousins images and are linking to each other’s posts: so you (and I!) can see her picks at History by the SeaI’m very curious to see if we have some common choices–or completely divergent ones! [update: they are totally different]

So here are my top ten Frank Cousins images from the Phillips Library Collection of his glass plate negatives, accessed through Digital Commonwealth (I’m not counting the Cousins Team above, that’s a freebie):

One. Lost houses and a lost street, named after a lost creek, with a lost church (the South Church on Chestnut Street, which burned down in 1903) in the background:  Creek Street, c. 1890.

Cousins_00461 Creek Street

 

Two. Norman Street, a street which has been obliterated by redevelopment and traffic—what is left of it is still being obliterated by the latter now. This is an astonishing image if you are familiar with the present-day Norman Street.

Cousins_00805 Norman Street

 

Three. The amazing Doyle House at 33 Summer Street, right next to Samuel McIntire’s house, both destroyed for the horrible Holyoke Mutual Building that was built in the 1930s and still stands on the block that extends from Norman to Gedney along Summer Streets. Look at how many additions this house had! Love the plank walks and garden layout too.

Cousins_02453 33 Summer Street

 

Four. The Pease and Price Bakery at 13 High Street, which was destroyed by fire on June 25, 1914, along with over 1300 other structures. This marks an important fire boundary—all the structures on the other side of High Street were saved: it’s very apparent when you walk down this street today.

Cousins_00463 13 High Street Pease and Price Bakery

 

Five. Photographs of lower Federal Street are hard to find: love these houses at 13-15, long gone. Their site is a parking lot now, of course.

Cousins 13 Federal

 

Six. A storefront window of Cousins’ own shop, the Bee-Hive, on Essex Street. I zoomed in a bit (this is another freebie, not #7!) so you could see what was for sale: shirtwaists and more, the Great Sale of Ladies Cotton! The Essex House, also long-gone, was right next door.

Cousins_00881 Store

Cousins Close Up

 

Seven. A Jacobean Monk table and chair. (plus unidentified man). Cousins photographed the collections of the Essex Institute and Peabody Museum as well: for the former, furniture was dragged out to the street where I presume there was better light. I love all of these “posing furniture” shots.

Cousins_03011 Jacobean Monk Table and Chair

 

Eight. 51 Boston Street, “The Senate”. The people, the signs, the cobblestone streets……another lost building, this time to the Fire, as it was situated just about at the center of its outbreak.

Cousins_01258 51 Boston Street the Senate

 

Nine. The Clifford Crowninshield House on lower Essex Street (on the left)–my only survivor among these images! This house has been a favorite of mine for quite some time, and it’s a bit run-down, so it’s nice to see it in better condition. I knew there must have been a window in that center entrance gable!

Cousins_00147 Clifford Crowninshield House

 

Ten. Laying the cornerstone for St. James Church on Federal Street, August 31, 1892. Just a great shot: Cousins was more of a documentarian than an artistic photographer but this image has both qualities.

Cousins St. James Church laying cornerstone

 

It was very tough to limit my choices to ten, but I’m sure more photographs from this amazing and now-accessible collection will work their way into my blog in the future: now go over to Jen’s blog for her picks!

Update: Now we also have the top ten Cousins picks of another friend, former student, and fellow Salem blogger, Alyssa Conary.


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